Contests + Bittorrent == good?

I was just thinking with OMG, if enough entries aren't going to change for a good week or two, maybe it would have been worth it to stick all the entries into a torrent and have people download the collection of files that way. I don't know if the load of OMG is at it's peak right now and if it'll be worth trying it out now, but I think it'd be worth a shot to do it in addition to what we have now.

Why should we use bittorrent here (and bundle all the games)?

- easier to download all the games at once (who wants to go through each game download page and click download)
- saves everyone a good deal of bandwidth off their home sites
- allows people without anywhere to really serve the files from a safe haven

Why shouldn't we?

- if games are being updated and continuously tweaked we'd have to make a new torrent (too much work) or users would miss out on the latest versions. We could easily get around this if only a few people continuously change and put the version numbers in a text file in the seeded files (and on the torrent download part)
- if few other people like the idea, the downloading could be slower

I'd be willing to use up as much of my upstream as I've got for this venture, so it's up to you guys, what do you think?

Each developer has "for slots" for downloads. Each developer on their own, should create a torrent of their game and add it to the slot. If they update their game, simply add a new torrent in the next slot, and at some point remove the old torrent. This way, the "downloads" are small (vs 200MB) and more up to date.

I would leave my Mac on and seed.

Alas, I think many devs don't know how to make torrents, so we need a step by step.

Hah. Yeah, they limit our bandwidth here but don't seem to block ports. Rice was one of the first universities online, so the backbone is pretty old. They're spending millions of dollars replacing it - that only makes it unstable. Gah. Still, I like that they don't regulate everything.

I'd seed as well. Though my machine (resp. its connection) isn't the fastest one around, the more seeder the merrier.
Got no limitations other than the bandwidth so just tell me when you're ready to go

Bachus Wrote:Of course, torrents should almost never be the only type of download. Most users have never even heard of Bittorrent, let alone know how to use it.

One way to get around this would be to make a bittorrent client branded to iDG for use in its contests (much like Blizzard's WoW client). This way user will go to iDG, download the "special iDG contest package", and open it to have the rest of the games downloaded over bt.

KittyMac Wrote:One way to get around this would be to make a bittorrent client branded to iDG for use in its contests (much like Blizzard's WoW client). This way user will go to iDG, download the "special iDG contest package", and open it to have the rest of the games downloaded over bt.

The custom client could include a voting / rating function as has been suggested in the past.